Before doing a comparative analysis of the advantages and disadvantages and the pros and cons, or the pricing comparisons, it’s important to know what to look out for. It is common to come across complaints about automation tools being incompatible with CRM and performance issues reported one month down the line. That can be painful. Companies that do not carry out a detailed research and miss out the fine print can end up burning their fingers by the sliding scale pricing structures and unexpected additional costs.
Having tackled what you should look for in a program, we can now move on to discussing our 20 best marketing automation software solutions for small businesses. If you’d like a more in-depth discussion on what these software solutions can do, you may read about the benefits of marketing automation software here . But, if you’re ready to check out our marketing automation software 2019 comparisons, then keep reading this article.
AI powered Business Growth Platform that offers a unique and in-depth integration with Salesforce, SugarCRM and SuiteCRM. INBOX25 unleashes and connects every digital engagement channel to build a truly data-driven marketing and sales program. The platform enables the deployment of a wide range of digital tools to Attract, Capture, Nurture & Analyze a firm's marketing database throughout the entire lifecycle; from prospect to brand loyalist. Delivering personalized customer experiences through complex and robust automated journeys has never been easier.
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business, whether your goal is to build your brand or sell more stuff. Our field guide provides everything you need to know to make the most of this platform. Learn how to create an email marketing plan, design effective emails, and test them. Then discover the power of automation and how to measure the success of your emails.
Marketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing[2] especially inbound marketing. Marketing Automation platforms are used as a hosted or web-based solution, and no software installation is required by a customer.
With ActiveCampaign, you’ll be able to create powerful automated marketing and sales processes. These intelligent processes “listen” and “learn” about the needs and interests of individual contacts. Then you can send more relevant, personalized messages at the moment they’ll have the most impact. You’ll have more customers, happier customers, and more loyal customers. MARKETING AUTOMATION: Our automation workflow builder is praised by G2Crowd users as the perfect balance of power and ease-of-use. With our drag-and-drop builder, you can easily create sophisticated follow up sequences that treat your contacts differently on the basis of who they are and what they’re interested in. This “intelligence-driven” follow up has proven to be more effective, and will keep your customer engagement high because you’re sending the most relevant, personalized messaging possible. SALES AUTOMATION: With an intuitive sales automation CRM tightly integrated with your marketing automation, you’ll be able to seamlessly transition leads back and forth between your marketing and sales processes without losing any data or missing a beat. Having your sales CRM and marketing automation under the same roof means that your sales process can benefit from the same automation features marketers use to send perfectly-timed messages. EMAIL MARKETING: We’ve been perfecting our email marketing solution since 2003. Today it is one of the most mature and fully-developed email marketing services on the market. Our professionally designed templates are fully mobile responsive and we offer time-saving tools like content blocks you can save and reuse across campaigns, message variables that allow you to update content once across all your campaigns, and conditional content, which allows you to change the content of an email based on who a contact is and what they’ve done. CROSS-CHANNEL MESSAGING FOR THE ENTIRE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE: With ActiveCampaign, you’ll be able to deliver the perfect message at the perfect time because you’ll collect more insight about the customer at each stage of the buying process. With Attribution, you’ll know the source of a visitor and what marketing and advertising they’ve interacted with. With Goals, you’ll be able to define important events and then pivot in response to conversions. With Site Messaging, SMS, and email marketing, you’ll be able to reach your contacts exactly where they are — whether they’re out and about on their mobile, browsing your website, or going through their inbox. We offer a free, no-credit-card-needed, 14-day trial so you can experience ActiveCampaign first hand.
HubSpot is a leading growth platform. Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 52,000 total customers in more than 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. Comprised of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, HubSpot gives companies the tools they need to Grow Better. HubSpot Marketing Hub has everything you need to run successful inbound marketing campaigns that make people interested in your business and happy to be your customer.
Drip is the world’s first ECRM–an Ecommerce CRM designed for building personal and profitable relationships with your customers at scale. Ecommerce marketers around the world are starting to see their customers in full color with Drip features like, comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation. They’re graduating from typical email platforms, bloated CRMs, or overhyped marketing automation tools, and making more money with Drip.
Infusionsoft is the only drag-and-drop tool we tested, which is a nifty feature for marketers who may wish to work on touchscreens or don't have time to deal with lengthy drop-down menus. It also provides unique tag removal that automatically pulls contacts from campaigns if they perform a certain action. For example, if contacts don't open three emails in a row, then you can set the tool to remove all such contacts from the workflow. This way, you're not sending messages into a vacuum. The tool also gives you the most useful real-time alert dashboard of any that we tested in this class. It lets you see every contact interaction with anyone in your database. So, if you sent an email to someone a week ago but they just opened it this second, then you'll see their name pop up at the top of your dashboard. From this tab, you can send a follow-up email or adjust the contact's standing within the specific workflow.

While traditional strategies may work, it might not be enough to meet the demands of the modern market. Times are changing, and so should your approach. Luckily, there are plenty of marketing automation software providers to choose from. This way, you can boost the way you sell your brand by accessing lead management tools, email and content marketing solutions, as well as social media management options.

Email Marketing Automation isn’t just for big companies. Constant Contact’s powerful, yet simple tools can help your organization develop more efficient and strategic email marketing, so you can save time while growing your business. Send a single welcome email, or an automated email series that nurtures leads. Build your list with ease, then send targeted messages to specific contacts. And get more value out of each email with action blocks that encourage subscribers to buy or donate. After all, the best results come from sending the right message to the right people at the right time—automatically.
Why does email list segmentation matter? We know that beyond relevancy, list segmentation is important from a revenue perspective. Data from the DMA indicates that segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all email revenue. On top of this, our research found that marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 76% increase in revenue–and more than 76% of marketers say basic segmentation is part of their email marketing strategy.
The success of a marketing automation implementation does not – primarily – depend on the selected marketing automation software either and – again – certainly is not about just “automating”. If the automated workflows, interactions, offers, content, analytics, etc. don’t take the human and targeted/personalized/personal dimension into account marketing automation implementations lack important success factors.
All in one Sales Execution and Marketing Automation Platform. Map your entire business process in hours not months. Designed to help you sell faster. With LeadSquared’s Marketing Automation tool you can:  Push your leads down the conversion path by sending the right message at the right time using automation.  Run high-performing email marketing campaigns with dozens of ready-to-use email templates to choose from.  Follow every movement of your lead with website tracking and prioritize them based on lead score and lead quality.  Create responsive landing pages in no time with numerous templates to choose from.  Organize and segment your leads on various factors to run targeted email and drip campaigns.  Integrate seamlessly with apps you love. Key LeadSquared Solutions are: 1) Lead Nurturing: Make your leads travel faster down the sales tunnel by using: a) Autoresponders: Ensure that the leads are greeted with relevant emails and SMS’ as they arrive. b) Drip Marketing: Send your prospects exactly what they need and when they need it. c) Email Marketing: Build and send beautiful emails that perform great on all devices. d) Lead and Website Tracking: Track all your lead activities and nurture them based on their actions on your website. e) List Segmentation: Segment leads based on their profiles and interests to nurture them accordingly. f) Content Library: Store your nurturing emails as templates to reuse them easily. 2) Lead Management System: Map your entire lead management process from capture till conversion with LeadSquared’s feature rich and hassle-free lead management system which include: a) Lead Capture Automation: You can ensure that no leads slip through the cracks and seamlessly capture leads from all your sources. (PPC, Social Media, Website, phone and more.) b) Email Integration: Sync your email inbox with LeadSquared to capture all prospect conversations. c) Lead Qualification: Use lead quality and activity scoring to identify and chase the best leads first. d) Lead Distribution: Assign leads to relevant sales people automatically, based on any rules you set. e) Tasks and Reminders: Automatically set tasks for your sales people based on lead actions. f) Source Tracking: Identify the lead generation sources working best for you. 3) Sales Management: It includes everything you need to manage your inside and field sales teams. a) Sales Tracking: Track everything - your salespeople, their performance and revenue. b) Sales Alert: Notify salespeople whenever their leads take an important action. c) Sales Automation: Leave repetitive yet important tasks to sales automation. 4) Marketing Analytics: Use our analytics to run data-driven campaigns and get better at marketing every single day. a) Drip Analytics: Get performance reports for each step of your drip marketing campaigns. b) Email Analytics: Analyze and improve each aspect of your email marketing campaign. c) Landing page: Get conversion analytics for each landing page and web form. d) Lead Funnel: Find where the leads are at each step of your marketing funnel. e) List Engagement: Find how engaged a list is by looking at its engagement index.

ActiveDEMAND is a flexible marketing platform for digital marketing agencies and marketers. ActiveDEMAND packages range from the full-featured call tracking application for the small business marketer to the powerful Marketing Agency Portal designed for digital marketing agencies with multi-client management needs. Engage and track prospects using the integrated, comprehensive call tracking module, do more with built-in email templates, landing pages and social media. Convert leads and prospects into customers using automated marketing to manage nurture campaigns, auto-replies and more. Retain customers and grow your repeat businesses with powerful newsletters, special promotions and more.

NAVIK MarketingAI is a cloud-hosted marketing automation platform built by absolutdata. Its aim is to help users improve the impact of their campaigns through hyper personalization, campaign simulators, dynamic micro segmentations, predicted behavior models, and other features. NAVIK MarketingAI also offers next best action recommendations, to make decision making processes are easier. As for their payment plans, they are offered on a by-quote basis, so you will have to contact the provider for their enterprise pricing information.
The adagio in marketing automation, content marketing, inbound marketing, content management and even email marketing is ‘providing the right information to the right people at the right time across the right channels’. Overlapping umbrella terms that in practice mainly focus on the message dimension, often even when it concerns timing (“What is the best time to xyz?”).
Businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B) firms have longer sales cycles and engage in more relationship building activities. Businesses that sell to consumers (B2C) rely more on brand and high-volume direct outreach efforts. This overview aims to improve understanding of how marketing software applications work and provide an update on trends every buyer should know.
Pretty much everything that Hubspot offers can be found elsewhere at a much lower cost. And yes, while it is true that Hubspot does offer a free version of their software, this doesn’t include any of their marketing automation features. If you’re looking to use Hubspot for marketing automation, you’ll need to cough up at least $800/month (paid annually), plus an additional $3,000 in onboarding fees. In other words, if your marketing automation budget is below $12,600/year, you may want to move on to our next suggestion.

In our email marketing software review roundup, we test the top email marketing tools available based on how easy it is to create emails, build subscriber lists, set auto-responders, and pull in other communication-based tools, such as social media management and web analytics software. To that end, we selected Campaigner and MailChimp as the best pure-play email marketing services. If you need a more complex tool that can build comprehensive workflows designed to automate the email marketing process, then we recommend HubSpot and Pardot, which are better served as marketing automation tools.

You can think of Eloqua as the Ferrari of marketing automation. It’s fully loaded, provides an exceptional level of service, and comes with a matching price tag. One of Eloqua’s key differentiators is the amount of time they spend teaching and helping their customers get the most out of the product. Like Marketo, Eloqua also has a great marketplace with plenty of integrations with third party services.

Funny timing that this post was put up today. I just had a meeting with a marketing consultant who was trying to sell my law firm on a whole new marketing package, including a new website, a social media strategy, etc. This person also said they had 10 years of experience in internet marketing. I told this person I thought each of the lawyers at my firm (who each have very different practice areas) should have an autoresponder set up. I said ideally each lawyer would have a “report” in the form of a PDF (available on their bio page) that would entice subscribers to download the report and sign up for the autoresponder.
MailChimp 12,000 emails per month (daily limit of 2,000), for up to 2,000 subscribers. MailChimp’s autoresponder range is comprehensive. It includes basic autoresponders (welcome, date-based, RSS etc), as well as more advanced options (e.g. ecommerce, tag-based). The main drawback – their autoresponder editor isn’t the easiest to use. (Full review)
The main reason we love Customer.io is its flexibility. This is a tool that will really let you get what you want out of it. While it’s not all out of the box, if you’re willing to put in some developer time, you can really customize your Customer.io experience. Another great thing about this tool is its lightweight UI and fast, personal customer support. Customer.io is one of the newer players, but they’re growing very quickly and are definitely a company to watch. Unlike most of the older tools, Customer.io is built to trigger emails based on events, rather than just pageviews.
I have to say I’m so insanely jaded by autoresponders since I’ve been in the web marketing business that I snub the thought of using them personally…but isn’t that the temptation we can so easily fall into…especially since we forget that most people are UNDER exposed to them and see them for the fresh content, authority-inducing mechanism they are.
Quality Emailing Tool. Sending emails to the right people at the right time may be one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of digital marketing. Fortunately, ActiveCampaign has an email management tool that allows you to create personalized and strategically scheduled emails. Additionally, it can support live ecommerce data and videos to create more engaging content for your clients and leads.
While marketing automation often looks at generating demand and new revenues by a “right time, right message, right touchpoint” approach, as we know it in content marketing and content management as well, it’s essential to also look at engagement with existing customers of course. After all, the total customer life cycle and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are essential. In this regarding marketing automation platforms are evolving and also facing competition from new vendors focussing more on customer engagement and experiences across the customer life cycle. Several vendors in the content management space have also been evolving from systems of records to systems of engagement. Marketing automation is part of an increasingly broader ecosystem and context where the customer and customer lifetime value are key. An introduction to the customer life cyle and models to calculate the customer lifetime value (CLV).
Both HubSpot and Pardot offer a vast array of functionality that should suit your business regardless of how intricate your marketing strategy might be. We found HubSpot to be better equipped for small businesses that are steadily growing their marketing activity, whereas Pardot is ideal for large enterprises with complicated marketing plans already in place. In total, we tested 10 marketing automation tools, each of which offer some unique features that make them stand out from the field.
Not only is InVision's newsletter a great mix of content, but I also love the nice balance between images and text, making it really easy to read and mobile-friendly -- which is especially important, because its newsletters are so long. (Below is just an excerpt, but you can read through the full email here.) We like the clever copy on the call-to-action (CTA) buttons, too.